Jeremy Cherfas

A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.

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Our Daily Bread 14 - The Daily Grind http://ow.ly/5IbY30ln1TY It has been a long time since anyone who wanted to eat bread had to first grind their wheat. Grinding, however, was absolutely fundamental to agricultural societies, and still is for some. Archaeologists can see how the work left its mark on the skeletons of the women who ground the corn in the valley of the Euphrates. Then, about 2500 years ago, in the area now called Catalonia, an unknown genius invented the first labour-saving device.

Our Daily Bread 13 - Bread from the Dead http://ow.ly/gqAn30ln1Rg It's a good thing the Egyptians believed strongly in an afterlife and wanted to make sure their dead had an ample supply of bread. The bread and the tomb inscriptions tell us something about how grain was grown and bread baked. To really understand the process, however, you need to be a practical-minded archaeologist like Delwen Samuel, who first set out to replicate Egyptian bread.

Our Daily Bread 12 - The inside story http://ow.ly/sT1F30lmWqK That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. I have no intention of getting into the whole pointless is it a fruit or a vegetable debate, so lets just agree that no matter what you call it, the wheat thing is made up of three major parts: bran, endosperm and germ. In this episode, a little about each of those parts and what they do for wheat.

Our Daily Bread 11 - It's not natural http://ow.ly/dVGu30lkIs3 Wheat has a hugely diverse genetic background, being made up of three different species, and genetic diversity is what allows breeders to find the traits they need to produce wheats that can cope with changing conditions. But because the accidents that created wheat might have happened just the once, plenty of diversity that is missing from modern wheats is still in wheat's ancestors. Trouble is, crossing a wild wheat with a modern wheat is almost impossible. Solution: remake modern wheat.

Our Daily Bread 10 - Dwarf wheat: On the shoulders of a giant http://ow.ly/GMGm30lkIm5 Norman Borlaug created the wheats that created the Green Revolution. They had short stems that could carry heavy ears of wheat, engorged by loads of fertiliser. They were resistant to devastating rust diseases. And they were insensitive to daylength, meaning they could be grown almost anywhere. All three traits had been bred into wheat 40 years before Borlaug got going, by the Italian pioneer Nazareno Strampelli.

Our Daily Bread 09 - Red Fife http://ow.ly/U7aJ30liK2e �For more than 40 years, one wheat variety dominated the Canadian prairies. Red Fife -- the red-seeded wheat grown by David Fife, a Scottish immigrant -- gave the highest yields of the best quality. It almost didn't happen, if you believe the stories. And then, having set the standard, Red Fife was eclipsed by its own offspring and slowly slid into oblivion. Until, in 1986, Sharon Rempel set about rescuing it.

Our Daily Bread 08 - Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov http://ow.ly/nxbJ30liJUz This short episode fails to do justice to the man who, more than anyone, first grasped the importance of knowing where and how wheat arose. It does, however, explain why Vavilov wanted to collect the 'building blocks' of future food security, for wheat and many other crops. In more than 60 countries, Vavilov and his colleagues gathered diversity from farmers' fields; they died protecting their collections.

Our Daily Bread 07 - Bake like an Egyptian http://ow.ly/6CJ430lfJ7K Kamut® is a modern wheat -- registered and trademarked in 1990 -- with an ancient lineage. The word is ancient Egyptian, and the hieroglyphics may literally mean "Soul of the Earth". More prosaically, "bread". The story of its discovery and growing popularity says a lot about our hunger for stories. It is also quite capable of leading hard-nosed molecular biologists astray

Our Daily Bread 06 - Hulled wheats http://ow.ly/hjYO30lfIYw Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".

Our Daily Bread 05 - At last: agriculture http://ow.ly/tA7x30lfEr1 Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.